ho roast themselves over a blazing fire in
a hot kitchen on a broiling day, all the morning, to cook scalding
plum pudding and redhot roasts, for no other reason than that their
grandmothers used to cook hot Christmas dinners in England.

And in the afternoon we went for a row on the river, pulling easily up
the anabranch and floating down with the stream under the shade of
the river timber--instead of going to sleep and waking up helpless and
soaked in perspiration, to find the women with headaches, as many do on
Christmas Day in Australia.

Mrs Woods tried to draw Jack out, but it was no use, and in the evening
he commenced drinking, and that made Billy uneasy. "I'm afraid Jack's on
the wrong track," he said.

After tea most of us collected about Watty's veranda. Most things that
happened in Bourke happened at Watty's pub, or near it.

If a horse bolted with a buggy or cart, he was generally stopped outside
Watty's, which seemed to suggest, as Mitchell said, that most of the
heroes drank at Watty's--also that the pluckiest men were found amongst
the hardest drinkers. (But sometimes the horse fetched up against
Watty's sign and lamppost--which was a stout one of "iron-bark"--and
smashed the trap.) Then Watty's was the Carriers' Arms, a union pub; and
Australian teamsters are mostly hard cases: while there was something in
Watty's beer which made men argue fluently, and the best fights came
off in his backyard. Watty's dogs were the most quarrelsome in town, and
there was a dog-fight there every other evening, followed as often as
not by a man-fight. If a bushman's horse ran away with him the chances
were that he'd be thrown on to Watty's veranda, if he wasn't pitched
into the bar; and victims of accidents, and sick, hard-up shearers,
were generally carried to Watty's pub, as being the most convenient and
comfortable for them. Mitchell denied that it was generosity or good
nature on Watty's part, he said it was all business--advertisement.
Watty knew what he was doing. He was very deep, was Watty. Mitchell
further hinted that if he was sick _he_ wouldn't be carried to Watty's,
for Watty knew what a thirsty business a funeral was. Tom Hall reckoned
that Watty bribed the Army on the quiet.

I was sitting on a stool along the veranda wall with Donald Macdonald,
Bob Brothers (the Giraffe) and Mitchell, and one or two others, and Jack
Moonlight sat on the floor with his back to the wall and his hat well
down over his ey